


I never knew daylight could be so violent

by YourFadedGlory (HisNameWasAce)



Series: Judgement [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Hurt Steve Rogers, M/M, Passing mention of suicidal ideation, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 07:16:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12789540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HisNameWasAce/pseuds/YourFadedGlory
Summary: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.





	I never knew daylight could be so violent

**Author's Note:**

> _“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite” _  
> __
> 
> ― Cassandra Clare

**Winter**

Steve ignores the urge to itch at the port of his g-tube. He doesn’t have the strength to lift his hands to do it himself and asking someone to do it seems like a monumental effort.

They talk to him, sit at his bedside and titter above the noise of the machinery. It’s mostly mundane things, bland as the mush that flows through the g-tube tube. Maybe it’s all they think he can stomach.

Clint’s favorite topic is the weather—he can’t stand the cold and he’s sick of the snow, but Bruce doesn’t charge rent, and there’s nowhere else to go.  Steve wonders about Laura and kids, wants to ask if they’re alright. He can’t find the energy, and even if he could, Clint is here, and they are not. Nothing about that is alright.

Bruce rambles about science and medicine. He paces while he does it, tapping pens against any hard surface with his reach. All the noise and the movement make Steve’s head swim. Every now and again Bruce will freeze mid-step, his epiphany moments as Steve has come to recognize them, before bursting into a flurry. He often thanks Steve for his advice, but Steve can’t imagine he contributes much when all he does is blink.

Natasha is his least frequent visitor, and his favorite. Steve hasn’t figured out if that relationship is a causal one. Sometimes she comes bearing bruises and split lips, marks from the outside world, from missions. She won’t admit to it, won’t hint at what she’s working on. She talks about ballets and museums and foreign mountains covered in snow and Steve does his best to believe her.

**Spring**

He can hold a spoon. The g-tube is still in, they’re still trying to get his weight up. But Steve can hold a spoon and he cries a little bit the first time he gracelessly shoves a glob of chocolate pudding in his mouth. It’s his first taste of chocolate since Andrew’s last rotation.

The memories that seize him at the thought of Andrew and the prison they’d so briefly shared makes him drop the spoon. It feels inexplicably harder to pick it back up again.

Bruce doesn’t know what to do with his tears. He just brings more pudding and by the time Steve’s finished, it doesn’t taste nearly as sweet.

**Summer**

He can stand, with a bar on either side of him and Natasha holding his weight, swearing encouragement in sharp barks of Russian. His first steps happen at three-something in the morning, the glare of the midnight sun fractured through his bathroom’s window as he relieves himself into a toilet.

Small mercies. Small victories.

He stumbles on his way back to bed, but his bladder is empty when he hits the floor.

**Fall**

He walks with a cane, after Bruce found him on the floor following his first successful bathroom trip, it has been his ever-present companion.

He eats with utensils and finds that Clint’s omelets and pancakes are more edible than he remembered.

Steve doesn’t speak. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know if he has anything to say. He sent himself to prison, a penance, a punishment he had craved in the wake of the civil war. He did not expect to survive it, with the way he eyes the butter knives, somedays he wished he hadn’t.

They worry about him, they whisper and hiss. Bruce iterates, nearly daily, that he isn’t this sort of doctor. That Steve is probably in need of doctors, plural, with a variety of specialties. Clint is angry, livid, in ways he expresses mostly in grunts and huffs. Natasha is quiet, patient, waiting.

Steve just doesn’t know what for.

**Winter**

Tony is in the lab.

He sits and he stares and Steve sits and he stares right back.

Tony looks like he’s aged a decade, the lines in his face carved deeper, the shadows under his eyes look permanent. There’s a shade of green in his pallor, it wasn’t there until he’d walked in, until he’d seen Steve.

He isn’t the same. He leans on a cane and he’s shorter and thinner and his hair is Thor reminiscent bun because Steve can’t stand the sound of the clippers.

“Where’s your friend?” Tony doesn’t have to say Bucky’s name for Steve to hear it, for Steve to feel it rip through his chest and leave an invisible but bloody wound. He’s kept his silence this long, he won’t break it now, most certainly not to tell Tony that Bucky is ashes in the Wakandan jungle and his arm smelted down into a puddle of ore back in the land from which it came.

“They said you weren’t talking.”

When Steve doesn’t respond, Tony sighs and it is a deep and hollowed sound. Steve would ache for him, but he doesn’t think his body can take another ache, it might fall apart in protest and if it simply doesn’t give up.

Tony sits and he waits. Steve sits and waits. Natasha stands by the door, chaperoning.

Tony is the first to give, rocking in his chair and levering himself to his feet. His joints pop with the tension of the hours.

“Where’s Ross?”

Steve doesn’t recognize his own voice, hoarse with disuse, worse than a pack-a-day smoker’s. He does recognize the moment the words compute for Tony, the way their jagged edges slip beneath his armor and draw blood.

Bucky is Tony’s Achilles’s, the fear that stares him in the face at night now that he has precious little to lose anymore—Ross, is Steve’s.

He’s relearned to walk, to eat, and speak. If Steve had to relearn this too, this maliciousness, this hate that he thought had been buried, he would.

He’d surrendered once before, had knelt at what was a facsimile of justice. He’d chosen a path of atonement for atrocities he had no part in making. Steve refused to carry the shame of being fooled twice, refused to open himself to a man made of hypocrisy.

When the door seals shut behind Tony, Steve looks at Natasha.

“I want to leave. I’m _going_ to leave.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know this isn't exactly in line with the way this series has previously been progressing, but this is what happened. 
> 
> Your kudos and comments are not given in vain, college is just hard and writers block is harder. Lots of love and a happy start of the holiday season to ya.


End file.
